When a mob sporting Confederate flags and QAnon signs heeds the President’s call to rampage the Capitol in the name of an absurd conspiracy theory, it’s obvious we’ve got some serious problems. But it’s already becoming almost equally clear that mainstream liberalism is incapable of recognizing what those problems actually are. So let’s clarify.
The problem isn’t that there was a failed coup. It’s that there was a successful demonstration of far right impunity.
Panic that there is a serious plot to stop the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump Biden is misguided. …
An Interview with Bronx Nurse and Health Care Activist Sean Petty
Sean Petty is a pediatric emergency room nurse at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx and the southern regional director for the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA).
In a March interview with The Indypendent’s Danny Katch, he predicted that the coming coronavirus spike would overwhelm a public hospital system that had been decimated by budget cuts and closures. …
For all of the catastrophic low points of Donald Trump’s time in office — praising murderous Nazis in Charlottesville, happily tossing paper towel rolls in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, promoting bleach injection as COVID protection — the most unbearable aspect off his presidency on a daily basis has been his unending assault on our ability to have a sustained thought.
Like a car alarm blaring day and night, Trump’s alternating sirens of fear and hate, ignorance and cruelty — broadcast across all of our screens and intruding into almost every conversation with family and friends — has made it impossible to…
Assuming he doesn’t chicken out, Donald Trump will take part in his second 2020 presidential debate tonight. His opponents will be Joe Biden, his own record, the notion of truth, and any sense of decency.
The good news is that the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) has introduced a new rule stating that each candidate’s microphone will be muted during his opponent’s initial two-minute statement for each of the six segments of the debate. So, we’ll hopefully only be subjected to Trump’s abusive routine for 78 minutes instead of the full 90.
It’s impossible to predict what will happen —…
Last night was a national humiliation. By that I don’t mean a humiliation for the nation, which has been a clown show since W stole the 2000 election. I mean a humiliation for every single person who resides inside its cruel borders.
Trump always humiliates himself, as do his supporters for cheering on his buffoonery. Joe Biden and Chris Wallace were pathetically dominated by a half-wit bully, after having four entire years to prepare for that exact scenario. But so were the rest of us by proxy (whether or not we support Biden).
Millions of us watching powerlessly as Trump…
“THE NINE most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
Ronald Reagan made this joke at a 1986 press conference and it has since become a cherished chestnut in conservative circles. It’s kind of sad for Republicans that they find this weak one-liner witty and it’s fully tragic for society that they genuinely think it’s a statement of profound wisdom.
Today, we are in desperate need of the kind of help that only government can provide: unemployment relief, a national system of COVID testing and tracing, centralized public health information and…
Since our studio was taken over last year by a private equity firm jointly run by Exxon Mobil, the Saudi royal family, and a mysterious multi-billionaire who always appears in shadows named Lucifer Frackwell, we at Big Energy Pictures have been eager to demonstrate that our change in ownership will not impact our our continuing commitment to bold and independent storytelling. That’s why we’re proud to announce our release of four movies this summer about climate change, each of which has been just barely tweaked by our new corporate overlords.
Unfortunately, the coronavirus lockdown hit just as we were set…
Danny Dromm has long been seen as one of the more progressive members of the New York City Council, known in particular for his advocacy of public schools and the LGBTQ community. But recently Dromm has become a target of advocates and protesters with whom he has often sided.
After the Finance Committee that he chairs passed a budget that removed a billion dollars from the police budget, Dromm celebrated a “responsible, transformative budget”, while critics derided “budget tricks” that mostly shuffled funding without addressing concerns about over-policing.
“This was a sham,” says Maria Bautista of the Alliance for Quality…
In these difficult times, our nation is forced once again to confront racial matters that many of us would prefer to avoid. At Whitemen Capital, the nation’s largest private investment fund in mortgages, health care, and for-profit prisons, we know that there is little we can do to directly address racial inequality, but we believe that we can and must play an important symbolic role in addressing this situation.
Moments like these require the leaders of Whitemen Capital to live up to our longtime motto, “Entitled to everything because we earned it.” And so in recent days, our board has…
New York City’s mayor claims he wants a just society but he is instinctively hostile to the protests and grassroots organizing necessary to win such it.
I met Bill de Blasio once, in March 2016, four years before he was being cursed every night for his spineless defense of police who senselessly beat bystanders and run over protesters in SUVs, before calls for his resignation were ringing out on New York City’s streets.
I was part of a delegation of public education activists invited to City Hall to discuss our concerns over New York State’s high-stakes testing regime — and the mayor’s gag order policy that barred city educators from criticizing the tests. We were ushered into the famous Governor’s Room, where we sat at an…
danny katch
writer, socialist, wiseass
